Alan in Indio heard everything went pear-shaped on MythBusters and wondered why it means that things went wrong. The literal adjective pear-shaped can describe body shape or, in linguistics, vocal production, but the slang failure sense appears in...
A clumsy person may be known as a bull in a china shop or a bull in a china closet. The former came into use first, in the early 1800s, but bull in china closet is more evocative. Plus, according to the MythBusters, a bull in a china shop is...
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s witches’ knickers! What do you call stray plastic bags that litter the landscape? Also, what it means to do something like a boss, how to hyphenate correctly, and why we say we have a crush on...
